From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  Ethnic divisions retarded workers’ solidarity. In Hawaii, the planters discouraged labor organizing by recruiting many nationalities and giving each its own holiday—Chinese New Year, Obon (the Japanese Festival of Souls), and Rizal Day for Filipinos (marking the Spanish execution of Jose Rizal in 1896). On the U.S. mainland, in some big industrial firms like Ford Motor Company workers of different races or nationalities worked side by side. Their common subordination to the production process might teach them to help each other resist and survive, but such shop-floor cooperation ended at the factory gate, and there were no plantwide unions to foster solidarity. Wherever workers assembled off the job, whether union hall, club, lodge, or church, racial and ethnic separatism was the order of the day. Color lines held firm; immigrants gathered by nationality and subdivided by religion; U.S. natives descended from northwestern Europe stood aloof from everyone else. The very few exceptions were mainly confined to the labor movement’s radical fringe.

  EARLY YEARS OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION

  Organized labor’s weakness in numbers and militancy helped set the stage for the Great Depression. While the Roaring Twenties saw gigantic increases in industrial output and home construction, unionism’s decline placed strict limits on both wage hikes and on workers’ ability to resist the speedups that helped limit industrial employment. The bottom line was that working people could not buy enough to sustain the system: earnings were simply too low and joblessness too common. By summer 1929, consumer spending had tapered off despite easy credit, home building had slumped, and manufacturers’ unsold inventories had swelled to the point where many firms were cutting production and laying off workers. The U.S. economy was already teetering when the stock market crash of October 1929 pushed it over the edge.

  Total national income fell from about $83 billion in 1929 to $40 billion in 1932. Working people got the worst of it. By January 1930, unemployed workers numbered 4 million. By the end of 1932, 15–17 million people were jobless, about a third of the labor force. Millions more made do with part-time jobs. Unions lost about half a million members.

  Wages were cut. From 1929 to 1933, average annual earnings fell 19 percent in transportation, 30 percent in manufacturing, 35 percent in mining, 42 percent in agriculture, 48 percent in construction. There was little cushion: fewer than half of white working-class families had savings in 1929, just $336 on the average. Workers of color had less.

  Local governments and charities tried to provide relief, but their efforts were overwhelmed. Homeless encampments sprang up on public or vacant land on the outskirts of cities across the country. Many households dissolved, their children going to friends, relatives, or homes run by charities. Hunger was widespread, and malnutrition encouraged the spread of diseases like tuberculosis and pellagra. New York City recorded ninety-five deaths by starvation in 1931. Despair flourished too: New York City reported 25,000 suicides in 1930–31.

  The depression hit minority and immigrant communities especially hard. In 1931, African Americans were 17 percent of the population and 33 percent of the unemployed—the disproportion was even more striking in cities like Charleston, South Carolina (49 percent of the population and 78 percent of the unemployed) and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (8 percent of the population, 38 percent of the unemployed). Tejanos called the depression “La Chilla” (“the squeal”) because it caused so much pain; in Texas an entire family could work all day picking cotton, and make just enough to buy themselves a single meal. After the blizzard of February 1932, New York City hired 12,000 men to shovel the streets; Bernardo de Vega recalled, “Many Puerto Ricans jumped at the chance to make some money . . . wrapped up in rags, their necks covered with old newspapers, swinging their shovels and shivering to the bone.” David Moore remembered African Americans in Detroit in 1929, the year he turned seventeen, “going around to these markets where there was a possibility of food, picking up rotten potatoes, cutting the rotten off to salvage some part of that potato that may be good.” Louise Mitchell remembered “slave markets” where black women waited on city street corners for a day’s housework: “They come as early as seven in the morning, wait as late as four in the afternoon with the hope that they will make enough to buy supper when they go home . . . if they are lucky, they get about 30 cents an hour.” A 1932 study of the unemployed in Chicago’s meatpacking district told the story of Rose Majewski, a Polish immigrant whose husband had abandoned her and their five children. Laid off from a janitorial job that had paid up to $21.50 a week, she got work cleaning chicken carcasses for $10–12 a week, but lost that job in June 1930 and could not find another. By 1932, she and her family lived in a converted barn on $5 a week from a private charity and a monthly box of food from the county welfare bureau.

  Immigrants were encouraged to leave. By winter 1932–33, about half a million Mexican nationals and their children had returned to Mexico. About 40 percent went voluntarily, often with the aid of workers’ organizations like Detroit’s Liga de Obreros y Campesinos. The rest were formally deported, chased out by vigilantes, or returned by charitable organizations that provided relief to Mexicans only when they agreed to leave the country. On the West Coast a wave of anti-Asian agitation and violence targeted Filipinos. In March 1934, Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act, which capped immigration from the Philippines and paid the return fare for Filipino nationals in the U.S. who promised never to come back.

  For the first two years of the crisis, the President and Congress insisted that relief was a local responsibility. Believing that recovery was just a matter of restoring business confidence, the Hoover administration organized conferences to persuade corporate executives to resume production and stop cutting wages, to hasten the recovery just around the corner. By 1932, something more was clearly required. The President proposed and Congress authorized the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which made loans to private companies for expansion (and new jobs) and to local governments for relief, and financed some federal construction projects. Congress also passed the Norris-LaGuardia Act, which barred injunctions against peaceful union activities, including strikes and pickets, and outlawed yellow dog contracts. Neither helped much: unemployment continued to rise, local governments continued to run out of relief funds, and the labor movement continued to shrink.

  In the early months of the depression, many corporations maintained their commitment to welfare capitalism, refraining from cutting wage rates, experimenting with job sharing to minimize lay-offs, providing loans and advances on pensions. But they could hold out only so long: in 1931, wage cuts began in earnest, followed by mass layoffs and further cuts in wages and benefits. In 1930, William Green had received a gold medal from the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Foundation in recognition of his efforts to curb labor unrest. Now he got a letter from an out-of-work machinist about to be evicted from his home: “The bankers and industrialists who have been running our country have proved their utter inability or indifference to put the country in a better condition.” Millions of people agreed.

  LABOR RISING

  One proposal for relief was government-sponsored unemployment insurance. AFL headquarters denounced the scheme as “socialist,” but a growing number of national unions and state and local federations backed it, and it was endorsed nearly unanimously at the November 1932 annual convention. But for the most part, labor protests in the early 1930s took place outside the AFL unions, often outside the workplace as well.

  Workplace revolts centered in mass production, mining, and agriculture—sectors where unionism had taken the worst beatings in the 1920s. In May 1931, 2,000 nonunion workers went on strike at a U.S. Rubber factory in Mishawaka, Indiana, to protest wage cuts and speedups. In July 1932, nonunion workers protesting wage cuts shut down more than a hundred hosiery and furniture factories in North Carolina. In Tampa, Florida, Cuban American cigar makers went on strike in 1931 when factory owners ousted the lectores who read aloud to the workers, probably to speed up the work since the workers hired the rea
der themselves.

  The National Miners Union, affiliated with the Trade Union Unity League, led coal strikes in Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and eastern Kentucky in 1931–32. The AFL’s United Mine Workers staged a four-month strike against wage cuts in Illinois in 1932. When UMW officials endorsed a settlement, many strikers revolted—18,000 UMW members broke away to form the Progressive Miners of America.

  In January and February of 1930, two strikes hit California’s Imperial Valley, one among Mexican and Filipino field hands, the other among white packing shed workers. TUUL organizers set up an Agricultural Industrial Workers League. After its most active organizers were convicted of criminal syndicalism, TUUL organizers started the Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union, which survived into 1935 and led twenty-four strikes, losing only three. January 1931 saw an uprising of 500 black sharecroppers in England, Arkansas. The following summer their counterparts in Tallapoosa County, Alabama, launched the Share Croppers’ Union, which had about 2,000 members across the state by spring 1933, and 6,000 a year later.

  The largest protest movement of the early 1930s involved the unemployed. Radical activists organized high-profile demonstrations like the Communist-led “hunger marches” of more than a million jobless workers in major cities across the country in 1930. But the movement mainly focused on grassroots organizing around local struggles. In San Francisco, for example, Communists in the Kungyu (Workers After Hours) Club supported calls for “work or bread” and unemployment insurance, and helped organize the Chinese Unemployed Alliance. CUA led demonstrations against the powerful Consolidated Chinese Benevolent Associations, demanding jobs and housing. The Communist Party built a national network of neighborhood-based Unemployed Councils that pressed relief agencies for aid, and rallied to block evictions of families for not paying rent. Socialists built similar groups in Baltimore and Chicago. A. J. Muste from Brookwood Labor College led a group of its graduates organizing Unemployed Citizens Leagues whose members used barter and labor exchanges.

  Unemployed organizing sometimes shaded into workplace organizing. On March 7, 1932, for example, Detroit’s Unemployed Councils joined with TUUL autoworkers in a mass protest in front of the Ford Company’s River Rouge Plant. Three thousand demonstrators demanded that Ford slow down its assembly lines and rehire laid-off workers. Police and company guards fired on the crowd, wounding more than sixty and killing four.

  The unemployed movement routinely organized across color lines, and its Communist-led sectors were especially active in defense of African Americans’ rights. The Councils rallied to support the nine young black men sentenced to death on false charges of rape in Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931, and Angelo Herndon, a nineteen-year-old black Communist sentenced to death under Georgia’s anti-insurrection law for organizing an interracial hunger march in Atlanta in 1932. Both struggles were successful, though justice was long in coming. Herndon was freed by the Supreme Court after a five-year legal battle, and the last Scottsboro defendants were released in 1950.

  Of all the protests that erupted in the early 1930s, none jolted the nation more than the Bonus March of 1932. Following the Great War, Congress had promised veterans bonuses of $50–100, payable in 1945. In summer 1932, 20,000 jobless veterans, organized in part by the left-wing Workers Ex-Serviceman’s League, converged on Washington, D.C. Many were accompanied by their families. They set up tent cities and vowed to stay put until Congress authorized immediate payment of the bonus. On July 28, troops commanded by General Douglas MacArthur, with Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower under his command, dispersed the veterans with tear gas, burned their encampment to the ground, and ran them out of town.

  As the Bonus Marchers straggled home amidst a deepening depression, radical songwriter Yip Harburg captured working people’s mood in his ballad, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime”:

  They used to tell me I was building a dream,

  And so I followed the mob.

  When there was earth to plough or guns to bear,

  I was always right there on the job.

  They used to tell me I was building a dream

  With peace and glory ahead,

  Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?

  Anger at the Hoover administration and its business allies had been rising since the depression began; now it reached a boil. The AFL remained neutral in the presidential election of 1932, which pitted Hoover against the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, an advocate of government relief programs and unemployment insurance. But while mainstream labor leaders proceeded with caution, the majority of Americans who went to the polls that year wanted a radical change. They elected Roosevelt by a hefty margin, then waited to see if the new president would make a difference.

  * In 1936, Congress extended the Act’s coverage to airlines.

  CHAPTER

  8

  LABOR ON THE MARCH

  When Franklin Roosevelt took office on March 4, 1933, the depression was deeper than ever. Jobless workers and their dependents numbered about 50 million;more than 5,500 banks had failed, wiping out many a depositor’s life savings; cities and towns were starting to shut down public services for lack of funds; countless farm and home mortgages were in foreclosure; many businesses could no longer cover their payrolls. To meet the crisis, Roosevelt immediately summoned Congress to a special session that ushered in a recovery program known as the New Deal.

  The New Deal was a mixed bag of reforms and emergency measures. It tightened government regulation of banks and the stock market. It created hundreds of thousands of jobs through public works projects. It revived state and local relief programs with massive federal grants that extended aid to some 27 million people—about a fifth of the national population—by 1934. Other New Deal initiatives included loans and subsidies to farmers; federal insurance of bank deposits up to $5,000; federal refinancing of home mortgages; the repeal of Prohibition by a Constitutional amendment passed by Congress and quickly ratified by the states;and an Indian Reorganization Act that provided for Native American home rule, ended compulsory individual allotments, and allowed Indian nations to form corporations modelled on the 1922 Navajo Tribal Council.

  The New Deal’s centerpiece was the National Industrial Recovery Act of June 1933. The NIRA aimed to resuscitate industrial production and profits by eliminating cut-throat competition among rival firms. The federal government suspended antitrust laws and called on business leaders in major industries like steel, auto, textiles, and mining to draw up “codes of fair competition,” which the President then signed into law. Smaller industries soon followed suit, extending NIRA codes to 90 percent of the nonagricultural economy. The codes regulated prices, production quotas, product standards, and labor conditions.

  A new federal agency, the National Recovery Administration, administered the program and touted it far and wide with parades, rallies, placards, and songs. The NRA’s “Blue Eagle” insignia adorned goods marketed by companies in compliance with the program, a seal of approval for patriotic shoppers. Noncompliant companies could be prosecuted, but the government seldom pressed charges, and relied instead on negotiation and persuasion, seeking what Roosevelt called a “partnership in planning” with business.

  Workers, on the other hand, would have to fight to be heard. At the government’s insistence, businessmen adopted industrial codes that banned child labor and established both minimum wages and maximum hours—typically a forty-hour work week for at least $12 to $15. This certainly improved conditions in many workplaces, but in the absence of unions, employers continued to hire and fire at will, to assign and speed up work, and to keep wage scales close to the new minimums.

  The New Deal’s main concession to workplace democracy was NIRA Section 7(a), which declared workers’ right to “organize and bargain collectively . . . free from the interference, restraint or coercion of employers.” But it soon become apparent that corporate executives did not intend to obey this part of the law; and that Washington woul
d not force the issue. The New Deal showed time and again that a federal declaration of labor rights was merely a piece of paper. To fulfill its promise, working people had to take matters into their own hands. They did just that, with a dynamism that startled the nation.

  From mid-1933 through 1934, about 2.5 million men and women went out on strike, and unions sprang up by the thousands, in workplaces where employers had once driven them out or where they had never formed before. These insurgencies gave birth to a new labor movement that would transform federal politics and policies, spark a rebellion in the American Federation of Labor, and bring the country’s most notorious union busters to the bargaining table. At the beginning, however, none of this looked likely: Washington was committed to a business-oriented New Deal, labor conservatives firmly controlled the AFL, and open-shop employers were gearing up for a new and final conflict.

  GRASSROOTS UNIONISM

  In May 1933, a month before Congress enacted the NIRA, St. Louis witnessed a strike that foreshadowed battles to come. Some 1,400 women walked off their jobs in the city’s nutshelling plants to fight for a rollback of wage cuts, equal pay for black and white workers, and union recognition. None of these women had much experience in the labor movement. About three-quarters of them were African Americans, risking their jobs at a moment when black unemployment rates stood well above 50 percent. They belonged to a newborn local of the Food Workers Industrial Union (FWIU), affiliated with the Trade Union Unity League instead of the larger and stronger AFL. For all of these reasons, employers expected to win hands down, but the strike’s grassroots character gave it surprising momentum.